I've needed a complete restore of all my files on several occasions. I have a physical hard drive on which I back up my items, but I don't do this often (every four to six weeks or so). In the meantime, I do take photos every day which I would be quite loath to lose.
I used to use Mozy.com because it was a monthly fee (easier to fit in budget). I had to use it for a restore once. I am still traumatized. There were about 60 files to download, they were not numbered or ordered in any user friendly way, and I had to download them one at a time and then try to remember which one I'd done last. They were each labeled with a random string of characters. Also there was no way to know what was in each zip file, so if I needed one thing quicker, it was too bad. And some files were several gigabytes, that I didn't want at all (like the windows.old file). I'm still not completely sure I downloaded everything from that one incident.
After that I switched to Carbonite and I love it. I've used it many times, and it's not just good for when your computer crashes. It makes moving your files to a new computer super painless, too. You can select important files to restore first and the program works in the background - you just leave the computer running and it hums along putting files back in the folders they were in before the crash.
Well, I'm posting this because if you were looking for a backup software you can use my referral link to buy Carbonite. They're running a special promotion right now where until January 3, if you buy it using my link, we EACH get a $20 Amazon gift card. The cost for unlimited file space backup for one computer is about $60/year.
Here's the link:
